electronic gamealso called computer game or video gameany interactive game operated by computer circuitry. The machines, or “platforms,” on which electronic games are played include general-purpose shared and personal computers, arcade consoles, video consoles connected to home television sets, and handheld game machines. The term video game can be used to represent the totality of these formats, or it can refer more specifically only to games played on devices with video displays: television and arcade consoles.

From chess to Spacewar! to Pong

The idea of playing games on computers is almost as old as the computer itself. Initially, the payoffs expected from this activity were closely related to the study of computation. For example, the mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon proposed in 1950 that computers could be programmed to play chess, and he questioned whether this would mean that a computer could think. Shannon’s proposal stimulated decades of research on chess- and checkers-playing programs, generally by computer scientists working in the field of artificial intelligence.

Many computer games grew out of university and industrial computer laboratories, often as technology demonstrations or “after hours” amusements of computer programmers and engineers. For example, in 1958 William A. Higinbotham of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York used an analog computer, control boxes, and an oscilloscope to create Tennis for Two as part of a public display for visitors to the laboratory. Only a few years later, Steve Russell, Alan Kotok, J. Martin Graetz, and others created Spacewar! (1962) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This game began as a demonstration program to show off the PDP-1 minicomputer donated by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) to MIT and the new Precision CRT Display Type 30 attached to it. This new technology appealed to the “hacker” culture of the Tech Model Railroad Club on campus, and its authors were members of this group. They wrote software and built control boxes that gave players the ability to move spaceships depicted on accurate star maps, maneuvering about and firing space torpedoes in a competitive match.

With the widespread adoption of PDPs on other campuses and laboratories in the 1960s and ’70s, Spacewar! was soon ubiquitous. One such institution was the University of Utah, home of a strong program in computer graphics and an electrical engineering student named Nolan Bushnell. After graduating, Bushnell moved to Silicon Valley to work for the Ampex Corporation. Bushnell had worked at an amusement park during college, and, after playing Spacewar!, he dreamed of filling entertainment arcades with such computer games. Together with one of his coworkers at Ampex, Ted Dabney, Bushnell designed Computer Space (1971), a coin-operated version of Spacewar! set in a wildly futuristic arcade cabinet. Although the game—manufactured and marketed by Nutting Associates, a vendor of coin-operated arcades—was a commercial failure, it established a design and general technical configuration for arcade consoles.

In 1972 Bushnell, Dabney, and Al Alcorn, another Ampex alumnus, founded the Atari Corporation. Bushnell asked Alcorn to design a simple game based on Ping-Pong, explaining by way of inspiration that Atari had received a contract to make it. While there was in fact no such contract, Alcorn was adept at television electronics and produced a simple and addictive game, which they named Pong. Unable to interest manufacturers of pinball games in this prototype, Bushnell and Alcorn installed it in a local bar, where it became an immediate success as a coin-operated game. After clearing a legal obstacle posed by the Magnavox Corporation’s hold on the patent for video games (discussed in the next section), Atari geared up to manufacture arcade consoles in volume, creating a new industry while also attracting competitors. See Sidebar: Pac-Man.

Early home video consoles

After computers and arcades, the third inspiration for early electronic games was television. Ralph Baer, a television engineer and manager at the military electronics firm of Sanders Associates (now part of BAE Systems), began in the late 1960s to develop technology and design games that could be played on television sets. In 1966 Baer designed circuitry to display and control moving dots on a television screen, leading to a simple chase game that he called Fox and Hounds. With this success in hand, Baer secured permission and funding from Sanders management to assemble a small group, the TV Game Project. Within a year several promising game designs had been demonstrated, and Baer’s group experimented with ways of delivering games to households by means such as cable television. In 1968 they completed the Brown Box, a solid-state prototype for a video game console. Three years later Baer was granted a U.S. patent for a “television gaming apparatus.” Magnavox acquired the rights soon thereafter, leading in 1972 to production of the first home video console, the Magnavox Odyssey.

The success of Pong as a coin-operated game led a number of companies, including Atari itself, to forge ahead with home versions and imitations of the game. Seeking to expand its coin-operated arcade business, Atari reached agreement with Sears, Roebuck and Company to manufacture and distribute the home version of Pong. Its success intensified the already brutal competition in this market. The Atari 2600 VCS (Video Computer System), released in 1977, and other new consoles followed the Odyssey model by offering multiple games. These systems were programmable in the sense that different game cartridges could be inserted into special slots—a technical step that encouraged the separation of game development from hardware design. Activision, founded in 1979 by four former Atari game designers, was the first company exclusively focused on game software. By 1983, however, a flood of poorly designed game titles for the leading home consoles led to a consumer backlash and a sharp decline in the video console industry, shifting momentum back to computer-based games.

Interactive fiction

Games developed for the first arcade and home consoles emphasized simplicity and action. This was partly out of necessity, due to the limitations of rudimentary display technologies, microprocessors, and other components and to the limited memory available for programs. (These traits also reflected the goal of creating games that would quickly swallow as many coins as possible.) Still, while the designs of games such as Atari’s Breakout (1976) or Taito’s Space Invaders (1978) were elegantly streamlined, these arcade hits generally offered little in terms of strategic depth, narrative, or simulation value. By the mid-1970s, however, several computer games challenged these restrictions. These games relied on text, networking, or other capabilities available on computers in academic laboratories.

One of the first was Hunt the Wumpus, which appeared in several versions for different systems. Kenneth Thompson, a researcher at Bell Laboratories, wrote one version in C for the UNIX operating system, which he had codeveloped; Gregory Yob wrote another in BASIC that was distributed widely through listings in early computer game magazines. Both versions were probably written in 1972. Hunt the Wumpus and games like it introduced the notion of defining a virtual space. Players explored this space by inputting simple text commands—such as room numbers or coordinates—from their keyboards. Such games could be easily shared, modified, and extended by programmers, resulting in a great variety of similar games. Players enjoyed considerable freedom of navigation in exploring the caves, dungeons, and castles typical of this genre.

The defining “text adventure” was Adventure, written by Will Crowther, probably in 1975, if not earlier. Crowther combined his experiences exploring Kentucky’s Mammoth and Flint Ridge caves and playing Dungeons and Dragons-style role-playing games with fantasy themes reminiscent of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Written in FORTRAN for the PDP-10 computer, Adventure became the prototype for an entirely new category of games, usually called “interactive fiction,” that boasted a new narrative structure. Such games shaped the player’s experience with descriptions of rooms, characters, and items and a story that evolved in response to the player’s choices. In Adventure this meant wandering through a dungeon to collect items and defeat monsters, but later titles featured more elaborate narratives. In 1976 Don Woods of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory came across a copy of the source code for Adventure and carefully revised the game, adding new elements that increased its popularity. This version and its variants were widely distributed by users of DEC minicomputers. By the late 1970s, home computers and video game consoles also made commercial distribution of these games possible, and text-based or simple graphical versions of Adventure were provided for many of these systems. See Sidebar: Zork.

Personal computer games

By the late 1970s, electronic games could be designed not only for large, university-based shared computers, video consoles, and arcade machines but also for the new breed of home computers equipped with their own general-purpose microprocessors. Apple II (1977) from Apple Computer, Inc. ’s Apple II (1977) (now Apple Inc.), and the IBM Personal Computer (1981) featured colour graphics, flexible storage capacity, and a variety of input devices. The Atari 800 (1979) and Commodore Business Machines’ Commodore 64 (1982) offered similar features, but they also retained cartridge slots for console-style games. Game designers took advantage of the greater flexibility of computers to explore new game genres, often inspired by complex paper-and-pencil role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons, various board games, and Crowther’s Adventure. Interactive fiction was a particularly successful format on personal computers. Infocom, perhaps the most successful computer game company of the early 1980s, adapted this style of game to a variety of literary formats, such as science fiction and mysteries. Infocom began with the popular Zork series, inspired directly by Adventure. Infocom games disdained graphics, relying on methods that allowed for more varied player input and story building and incorporating techniques such as language parsing and database programming learned by its founders at MIT to stimulate the player’s imagination.

Other games—such as the King’s Quest series by Sierra On-Line (1983), military simulations and role-playing games published by Strategic Simulations Incorporated (founded in 1979), Richard Garriott’s Akalabeth/Ultima series (1979), and the sports and multimedia titles of Electronic Arts (founded in 1982)—extended the simulation and storytelling capacity of computer games. Networked games added a social dimension. Empire had been developed as part of the PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) Project at the University of Illinois during the early 1970s, and the possibilities of social interaction and networked-based graphics were thoroughly explored as part of this project and the games that resulted from it. MUD (Multi User Dungeon), developed in 1979 by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at the University of Essex, England, combined interactive fiction, role-playing, programming, and dial-up modem access to a shared computer. It inspired dozens of popular multiplayer games, known collectively as MUDs, that placed players in a virtual world that functioned on the basis of social interaction as much as structured game play. Hundreds of themed multiplayer MUDs were written during the 1980s and early ’90s.

The return of video consoles

Two Japanese manufacturers of coin-operated video games, the Nintendo Co., Ltd., and Sega Enterprises Ltd., introduced a new generation of video consoles, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES; 1985) and the Sega Genesis (1989), with graphics that equaled or exceeded the capabilities of personal computers. More important, Nintendo introduced battery-powered storage cartridges that enabled players to save games in progress. Games such as Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers (1985) and The Legend of Zelda (1987; see Sidebar: The Legend of Zelda), as well as Squaresoft’s Final Fantasy series (1987; originally for Nintendo only), fully exploited the ability to save games in progress; they used it to provide deeper game experiences, flexible character development, and complex interactive environments. These qualities encouraged comparisons between video games and other narrative media such as cinema. In 1989 Nintendo extended its business success with the introduction of Game Boy, a handheld game system with a small monochrome display. It was not the first portable game player—Nintendo had marketed the small Game and Watch player since 1980—but it offered a new puzzle game, Alexey Pajitnov’s Tetris (1989), an international best-seller that was ideally suited to the new device. More units of Game Boy, continued by the Game Boy Advance in 2001, have been sold than any other game device.

The next generation of video game consoles, including the Sony Corporation’s Playstation 2 (2000), Nintendo’s GameCube (2001), and the Microsoft Corporation’s Xbox (2001), has been defined primarily by superior technology, especially graphics, though a more important trend may be the increasing convergence of these consoles with the networking and storage capacities of personal computers.

Networked games and virtual worlds

During the 1990s, computer game designers exploited three-dimensional graphics, faster microprocessors, networking, handheld and wireless game devices, and the Internet to develop new genres for video consoles, personal computers, and networked environments. These included first-person “shooters”—action games in which the environment is seen from the player’s view—such as id Software’s Wolfenstein 3-D (1991), DOOM (1993; see Sidebar: DOOM), and Quake (1996); sports games such as Electronic Arts’ Madden Football series (1989), based on motion-capture systems and artificial intelligence; and massively multiplayer games such as Ultima Online (1997) and Everquest (1998), combining traits of MUDs with graphical role-playing games to allow thousands of subscribers to create “avatars” (that is, representative icons or animated computer characters) and to explore “persistent” virtual worlds.

Today communities of game players organize themselves around multiplayer teams (or “clans”), Web sites devoted to specific games, and independent modifications (or “mods”) of published games. These groups share common interests in computer game titles, using the Internet, broadband connections, LAN (local area network) parties, and other applications of networking technology in ways that increasingly merge in-game and out-of-game social experiences. For titles such as The Sims (2000) and Half-Life: Counterstrike (2000), this overlapping of virtual game worlds, in which multiplayer games are played, and virtual game communities, in which players socialize, is extending the range of player involvement while challenging game publishers to develop new forms of content.

Sales of computer and video games, including hardware and accessories, exceeded $10 billion in 2001 in the United States alone; in comparison, box office receipts for the American movie industry were about $8.35 billion. Global sales of hardware and software were expected to exceed $30 billion in 2002. The publishers of Half-Life: Counterstrike, the most popular multiplayer game, reported some 3.4 billion player-minutes per month in mid-2002, exceeding viewership for even the highest-rated American television shows. Statistics such as these are often cited to demonstrate the rapidly growing importance of computer games as an entertainment medium.